Best of Women Amplified: Elizabeth Gilbert on Fear and Creativity

Celeste Headlee:
I mean, one of the things that struck me immediately about going through your biography was how many jobs you’ve had. And some of them really have nothing to do, one would think, with writing. And I wonder if those are experiences that you just tossed out or if you think that there’s stuff that you still hold onto from all, like cook on a dude ranch, which you’ve written quite a bit about, but some of these many, many jobs that you’ve had, what has stuck with you?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Well part of it is just that I only have ever had an office job once in my life, and I worked for a summer at a chemical plant, and worked with the secretaries as a filing assistant or something. And it was so horrifying for me that a decision was made that I can never ever, ever … I will do anything, but I won’t, I cannot have a nine to five job. I will die if I have a nine to five job. And so after that, I did do anything. That just opened up the field, and I knew that I wanted to be a writer, so I was pursuing that. So a lot of those jobs were just about the jobs that were available. So that would be babysitting and being a diner waitress and being a bartender and a cook and a ranch hand, but truly, even to this day, I will do anything not to sit under fluorescent lights for 40 hours a week. I just can’t do it. I just can’t do it. I’ll clean toilets before I do that, and have done.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
So some of that diversity in jobs was just about how am I going to make money?

Celeste Headlee:
Necessity, yeah.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Necessity. And then some of it too was about gathering research because I knew that I wanted to write and I knew that I wanted to hear as many different kinds of people’s voices as I possibly could. So the best job for that was being a diner waitress in the morning shift. Just having a parade of people come in all day and hearing the way they speak and seeing the way they engage. So I did think of it as research at the same time as moneymaking, and I feel like it did go into the work. You probably just don’t see it because you don’t know where I’m getting those bits of dialogue from, but they’re just mostly from those experiences.

Celeste Headlee:
So how do you go about writing? You get up. Are you a morning writer or evening writer?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I’m a morning writer, yeah.

Celeste Headlee:
So you get up. Do you always write in the same place?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
No. And I don’t write every day. I write seasonally.

Celeste Headlee:
Interesting.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
For me, the amount of work that it takes to create a book is mostly in the preparation, and the preparation takes years. So, it takes a long time. Plus by the time I’m finished with a book, I feel like I’ve left everything on the field and I don’t have anything. So it’s not like the next day I can sit down and start writing again. I have a friend, Hannah Tinti, who’s a wonderful fiction writer, and she said something to me recently, like, “After I finished writing that novel, I just felt I was so depleted. I was so empty. I didn’t have anything.” And I was like, “Good. That’s actually how you should feel when you’re done, and you should now not do anything for a couple of years because it’s going to take a while for that well to fill up again with the groundwater that’s needed to have creativity.”

Elizabeth Gilbert:
It’s crazy to think that next week you should be able to pick up again. You don’t have ideas. They’re all in that last book. You don’t have energy. They’re all in that last book. So for me, seasonal. So I do an enormous amount of research, enormous amount of preparation, a lot of outlining of the plot and the story, and then I sit down to work. And then it’s like being in the Marines in boot camp. It’s just, I’m up at five o’clock in the morning and I write all morning and I stare at the wall for the rest of the afternoon and I go to sleep at 7:30 or eight o’clock at night and I do it again the next day until the book is done. And that is usually a very short period of time. It’s a big intensive blast. And then when it’s done, it’s going to take me a while to do it again.

Celeste Headlee:
It’s interesting how many writers tell me that they had no idea how to handle any of the business end. That they felt unprepared to read contracts or didn’t know that you don’t get your book advance in one …

Elizabeth Gilbert:
We’re such idiots. All us artists, we’re just like-

Celeste Headlee:
A big Publisher Clearing House check.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
… isn’t there going to be a big giant check that’s going to come? Yeah.

Celeste Headlee:
And I wonder what that was like for you as you became more than a writer and a business woman. How was that transition?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Well, a couple of things come to mind. One is that I very unexpectedly earned a lot of money, and that’s not something that I ever anticipated for my life. And I hadn’t set my life-

Celeste Headlee:
You thought you’d be poor forever?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Well, not poor because I think the word poor indicates a kind of, it’s different. Poverty is different from what I was expecting. I was expecting to be a working artist who supported herself with other jobs.

Celeste Headlee:
I see.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
So, that to me didn’t mean poor. It meant frugal. You know, frugal, which fortunately I was raised that way. My family’s very frugal.

Celeste Headlee:
Yeah, grew up on a farm famously.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah, they’re very tight and they’re very … I wasn’t raised with a lot of obsession with materiality. And I was raised by people who were very stubbornly independent. So I expected to have a life of being my own sugar daddy and my own patron, which would mean supporting myself however I needed to support myself. But that didn’t feel frightening to me. That felt exciting and autonomous to me. But I never expected that I would have abundance. I always knew that I would be able to take care of myself because I was raised to. I expected to and I did, but I didn’t think that I would be fricking rich. That was never my plan, nor was it as though when I told people when I was young that I wanted to be a writer, they were like, “Yeah, that’s where the money is, kid.” You know?

Celeste Headlee:
Yeah. Your sister’s a writer too, right?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah. That’s where the big, big dollars are to be found, is in creative writing. And then Eat, Pray, Love happened, and all of a sudden I was flooded with money, which certainly is not a catastrophe. It’s just a very interesting thing to figure out how to handle. And I handled it with mixed results in different ways. One way was that I decided that everyone I knew who was an artist and a creator also had to share in this abundance because they were just as talented. They just hadn’t gotten as lucky. And so I went around just giving money away to all of my friends, or buying them a house to live in or funding their project, and that had mixed results. In some ways, some beautiful things came out of that. In some ways, some friendships were destroyed by that. Money is weird. It’s a hard thing to navigate. I’m not saying poor me.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I’m delighted that I had that great, good fortune, but I had to learn how to restrain myself a little bit in some of my initial impulses, which was this is our money. We were all going to be starving artists together and now everyone’s going to share in this at the same time. And that, I’ve now learned to use it in different ways. I’m more likely now to throw my spotlight or my money behind organizations that are already very well established at doing good things with money, with boards of directors who know how to do it, rather than me just taking it into my own hands to do these outrageous acts on one-on-one giving, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, when for instance, Planned Parenthood is out there doing great things and you can help them. So, there’s just other ways to do it at this point, but that just took a while to figure out.

Celeste Headlee:
That can’t be the only surreal part of your life. Right? I mean there’s also the fact that Eat, Pray, Love was very confessional, and then you must have people that come to you on the street and feel like they know you after reading your writing.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Well, they do. That’s not insanity on their part. That doesn’t feel surreal to me because they do know me and they continue to know me because I continue to be confessional. And I’m really open on social media about my life and about my emotional experiences. If I meet you at a bus stop for five minutes, I’m going to hopefully have a real conversation with you about your life and mine. I’ve never been a private person. And so I don’t think those people are crazy when they come up to me and say, “This sounds really insane, but I feel as though I know you.” No, I’m the one who told you everything about myself. So that’s not, you’re not delusional. You actually really do have a pretty good idea of what I’m like and who I am. The reason this conversation feels awkward, and I’ve said this a million times to people, is because I don’t know you. And so there’s an imbalance, and that’s why it feels strange because you feel a sort of kinship to me, but I don’t know you.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
So, let’s narrow that, and why don’t you tell me some stuff about you so that we actually can be on a more equal footing? And I’m actually interested in knowing about you. So now let’s talk about you. And that seems to make it go a little less awkwardly.

Celeste Headlee:
What affect does that have on your energy? Is it tiring to be emotionally engaged with so many people?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I mean, I’m not out there. It depends. I don’t want to close it off, so I’ve had to learn how to do it in a way that’s healthy and reasonable within reason for somebody who’s an over-sharer by nature. Not doing book signing lines has helped a lot. That’s the one thing that I’ve changed is that I don’t do that anymore because sitting at a table and having that level of intimacy and expectation with 500 people in a row is really not possible, but the problem is that I want to, and then I leave from there and I’m really tired. But social media becomes that where I can actually have that engagement intimately with people. I can respond to their responses. We can start conversations up. Other people can come into that dialogue. And that’s something you can choose to dip into at anytime of day when you feel like it. It’s not as immediate as the book signing line for instance.

Celeste Headlee:
Do you have to make a choice though every time you reveal very deeply personal things? And when your partner died, was that a conscious choice?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m smiling and I’m laughing because everyone else is so much more protective of my privacy than I am, including you at this moment. You’re concerned with … Look, I just never was a private person. I think that’s the odd thing is that I always say that I have the soul of a very serious novelist and a very serious literary person, but I have the personality of an airline hostess, an aerobics instructor basically. I really do want to constantly be engaged with people. I always did, even as a little kid. It’s who I am. It’s my nature. I’m very [crosstalk 00:00:11:30].

Celeste Headlee:
Oddly though, you had no neighbors on the farm, right?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I know. And it was terrible. And my dream was always to live in town. We lived on a farm and I was so jealous of those kids who lived in town who could ride bikes to each other’s houses, and so I’ve sort of become a kid who lives in town. I now live in New York City, and I am really active in the world because that’s what I longed for. There just were not enough people around for my taste.

Celeste Headlee:
So let’s pivot and talk about the work, shall we?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah.

Celeste Headlee:
You wrote Big Magic before you launched the podcast, and it makes me wonder what have you learned from people from interviewing them that you might want to add into the book?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Oh, that’s so interesting. Yeah, I probably should’ve done it the other way, huh? Although, I mean-

Celeste Headlee:
The book’s great.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Thanks. Well, I mean the book is drawn from years of … The book really came because of the TED Talk that I gave about creativity.

Celeste Headlee:
One of the most popular of all time.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Really it was very popular and caused people, it kind of opened up this second career for me because until that point, I mean Eat, Pray, Love, plus the podcast opened up, or sorry, plus the TED Talk opened up this other avenue for me of people wanting advice about their journeys, for lack of a better word, their creative endeavors. They are wanting permission slips really to travel, to get divorced, to try something new, to dare to define themselves as an artist, to want more. I feel like I’m really just a big walking permission slip that goes around the world telling people, particularly women, 98% of my readers are women, that it’s okay, that yes, I do also think that you should write a book. Yes, I do also think that you are allowed to want more for yourself than this marriage is giving you. I agree.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Do you want an authority figure to say that it’s okay for you to take a risk or to change your life? I am delighted to provide that role in your life. Until you have the courage to be your own permission slip, I’m happy to be at for you. And so I think Big Magic was just about codifying that in a way so that there was a book that I could hand people that could say, “Here’s all the permission that I want to give you.”

Celeste Headlee:
Here’s your FAQs.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yes, exactly. And here are some things that I’ve learned. Here are some obstacles and fears that I bet that you’re probably having. Here are some ways to deal with that. Here are some ways to talk to the reptile brain to make it settle down so that your creative brain can get out of fear and into innovation. And here’s some encouragement. And then the podcast taught me, again, not that I didn’t know this already, but there really is only one reason that people don’t create and it’s because they’re afraid. And that’s only ever the reason.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And in all the other excuses that we give and all the other obstacles that we have, I just have to scratch them with the tiniest fingernail, and underneath it, I’m just going to see our old friend fear showing up in all his different disguises to tell you that you’re not worthy, that you don’t have time, that you don’t have the right degrees, that the best work is behind you, that you’re too old, that no one cares, that it’s not … All of that is just fear. The thousand faces of fear showing up again and again to tell you to stay small. And so the podcast was just about trying to help people get on the other side of that.

Celeste Headlee:
I mean, I was really interested to find out that a huge percentage of book contracts are never fulfilled. People will get a book advance and have to return it because they don’t write the book. It sounds like you’re saying that even at that point, even after they’ve sold a book, it would be fear that held them back.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Sure. Or how about your second one? That’s the one, even as you are writing, even if you finish your first one, I guarantee you that you’ve got a monstrous terrorist living in your head, telling you that you will never do a second one. That this one is going to bomb and that you’ll never get a … that you only ever had one idea in your mind.

Celeste Headlee:
I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
It never stops. And it’s that way with your 10th book too. I’m here to deliver the bad news that it doesn’t go away. And I think we live in a society that really fetishizes the idea of being fearless and that you’re constantly being told that in various, really violent, almost aggressive language to kick fear in the ass and to punch it in the face and to show it who’s boss, and to wrestle it to the ground. It’s this constant war. The language is one of war. But in my experience, anytime I have fought against my fear, it has won because it fights back harder. It just digs in and it shows me who’s boss, which is it. And the only way that I’ve ever been able to, air quotes, conquer it has been to allow it to exist and to come with it a much softer energy and to see it for what it is, which is not really a terrorist monster, but an orphaned child, a small little part of you that just is so fearful.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And to just mother it and to say, look, I can see that you’re really scared and I see that you don’t think that you’re worthy and I see that you are terrified that this whole thing is going to bomb and blow up and that everyone’s going to know that you’re a fraud. And I acknowledge and respect that as being very real, and you are part of this family. You, fear, are part of this family and you have a place here and you’re just as much a part of the family as creativity is. You’re just as much part of the family as longing and all the other human emotions. I will never tell you to leave. I will never tell you to leave. You get to be in the minivan with the rest of the family. I just can’t let you drive because you’re seven years old. You’re seven years old, you’re too little. You’re not allowed to drive. You can be with us, but we’re going to go on this road trip. You’re going to have to sit in the back with the other kids, anxiety, panic, terror, all of them.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
They’re all in the minivan. They’re always going to be in the minivan, but we’re doing this anyway and you can come with us and you’re going to do this anyway. And I know, fear, that your role in the family is that as we’re on this road trip toward creativity or adventure, the new or the big new thing that we want to do, I understand that your role is to sit in the back and scream that we’re all going to die and you do it really well, and you just keep doing that, and we’re going anyway and I love you. And there’s something about the I love you, you’re welcome, you’re part of this that somehow makes it quiet down. It doesn’t go away, it just quiets. I think all it wants is to belong like the rest of us. It’s just the part of you that doesn’t believe that it belongs. And you just have to keep coming at it with that really mothering tone.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And when I say mother, I don’t mean the mother you actually had. I mean the universal loving, compassionate kind mother that you wish you had, the one who said, whatever happens, I love you. Whatever happens, you’re welcome. Whether this is a success or a failure, you belong to me, you’re mine. That sort of language that we have to learn how to bring to ourselves because all too often we actually didn’t get that when we were kids because we were raised by people who themselves were terrified. So it’s just a love contest really in the end, I think. And it’s not the way that our culture teaches you to deal with fear, but it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to get anything done.

Celeste Headlee:
So, I wonder what the difference is and the challenge, and please forgive me and correct me if I get this wrong, but I think you were the first one since Norman Mailer to be an unpublished author that got a piece in the New Yorker.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
In Esquire.

Celeste Headlee:
In Esquire.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
The New Yorker still won’t have me, but Esquire.

Celeste Headlee:
Well, New Yorker listeners.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I try. I keep trying. I keep knocking on that door. Esquire, yeah.

Celeste Headlee:
And I wonder what is the difference of the task between a short story and a novel?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Honestly, I think it’s the same, and I also think it’s the same between a nonfiction book and a fiction book.

Celeste Headlee:
That was my next question.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I also think it’s the same between a memoir and a biography, and I think I can really say that with some assurance because I’ve written a lot of them.

Celeste Headlee:
Yeah, you’ve done all of them.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And I think it’s the same writing a poem. I think it’s the same process. And I think another way that fear manifests itself in the creative life is to make these big distinctions between these things when actually really, it’s always the same process. Always. It’s always, and there’s really only one job, and the job is can you get on the other side of fear? That’s it. And then it doesn’t … It’s the same. Telling a story is telling a story, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, memoir or biography. The question that I have once I’ve managed to do it and run around fear as best I can, is who am I talking to? And that’s for me a very real question. It’s not a-

Celeste Headlee:
You picture a real person?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
A real, and it has to be somebody I know. Who is this book for? Who am I telling this story to? And that’s the best piece of writing advice that I could ever give, is that everything that you write should be written to one person only. I often ask people when they’re working on projects, who are you writing to? And they’ll give me a demographic, like women between the ages of 30 and 45 who are having career … I’m like, that’s not a person. And so your book’s going to sound like it’s written to a demographic. Write to a human being. Take one person who you know, who you ideally love, who you care about, who you want to delight or inform or help or reach. And then directly as though you are writing a letter, write that book to them. And every book that I’ve ever written has been written to one human being at a time.

Celeste Headlee:
Do they all know?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Some of them don’t know. I think that when I wrote my book, The Last American Man, I wrote it to a guy named Andrew Corsello, who’s a friend of mine who used to be a colleague of mine at GQ, and he was the one person in the world who I thought would be most delighted by this story if I told it right. And so, I wrote it to him, and I respect him as a writer, so I wanted to write in a way that impressed him. I don’t even know if he knows that, but yeah, I wrote that whole book …

Celeste Headlee:
He might now.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
He might now, yeah exactly. But I wrote The Signature of All Things to my fourth grade teacher, Miss Sandy Carpenter, who was the first feminist I ever met and who was somebody who introduced us all at the age of nine to Hemingway and to literature and who’s still, and she’s almost 80, is still one of the most passionate and widely read consumers of literature that I know. She’s the one who will call me and say, “Have you read the Goldfinch yet? What do you think? What do you think of the new Franzen book? What do you think of the new,” you know.

Celeste Headlee:
That’s awesome.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And so, I wanted to delight her with a really big, juicy, classical kind of 19th century novel that I knew she would love. If I’d written that book to Andrew Corsello rather than her, it would be a totally different book. So, who you’re speaking to changes the tone of your voice. You know this. Everyone that you talk to you talk to differently because different level of intellect or different level of interest, and so that’s how you humanize your writing.

Celeste Headlee:
And I also read that you regularly, every so often redo the program, The Artist’s Way, which is a 12 week course. It’s been around for a very, very long time. And I wonder why you do that. What do you still get out of it?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I’m a different person every minute. I’m a woman, I’m a different person every day. I fluctuate, and my life fluctuates and my priorities change and my desires change and I need to check in with myself. And The Artist’s Way is a really good solid program that will help you ask some really searching questions of yourself about what you want to do next. I often say because it’s true that Eat, Pray, Love wouldn’t have existed without The Artist’s Way. It was doing that work and doing that program that got me to a place of … It helps you really narrow in on what you really want to be doing. And she asks you every day in various different ways as you’re doing these exercises, in a perfect world, if you had unlimited resources, if you had unlimited time, if you had unlimited support, what would you want to be doing? What skills do you wish that you had? What talents do you wish you had fostered?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And for me, after I did that and went back and read everything I’d been writing for those 12 weeks, almost on every single page it said that I want to speak Italian, I want to speak Italian. And I didn’t know that about myself. There are things about yourself that you don’t know until you take the time to really drive in your attention and see what’s happening in your consciousness. And I came away from that like, wow, I guess I really want to learn Italian. I had no idea this was such a prevalent desire. And that’s a doable thing.

Celeste Headlee:
And now buon giorno.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And buon giorno. Unfortunately [Italian 00:24:45] because it’s been like 10 years since I was living in Rome. But I did go and take it on and I started taking night classes, and I had nothing that I was aiming toward. There was nothing that it was for. It was because I just wanted it. I didn’t have a project around it. I just-

Celeste Headlee:
Why is that important?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I think that in our brutal capitalistic productivity minded society, you’re not allowed to do something unless it’s for something, unless there’s some idealized monetized, you either have to be doing it because you’re going to change the world with it or because you’re going to make money from it or because it will benefit your career. I didn’t have any, there’s no economic pay out for me in learning Italian. I just wanted that language in my mouth and my mind. And so I started taking night classes in it. And after six months of that, it was like, I need to go to Italy. I need to learn. I need to be speaking Italian in Italy. And from that, Eat, Pray, Love was born. And that all came out of The Artist’s Way. So, I obviously can’t recommend it highly enough.

Celeste Headlee:
So I wanted to actually read you a couple of things that you’ve said that interested me.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I love that I have no idea what you’re about to say.

Celeste Headlee:
So here’s something that you said on your writing schedule. I won’t read the whole thing, but you say, “My life’s divided into times when I’m actively writing a book and times when I’m not. I’m only actively writing a book once every three or four years,” which you explained. But you said, “It’s a militaristic thing, the early hours. I really want to be uninterrupted. The world doesn’t wake up in a way that bothers you until 9:00 AM and that’s when the phone starts ringing. Emails and texts start coming in.” I’m really interested in that word militaristic, and you used it before. You said it was like going to bootcamp. Is that how you see that discipline of getting to that table every day?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah.

Celeste Headlee:
It is?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I do, and I say it lovingly. I think part of the reason that I only do that every three or four years is because it’s so intense. I mean I know I could not sustain that over a long period of time. It would be like doing a marathon every month. You just can’t. But during that precious sacred time of writing, the best way that I can honor it is with that militaristic discipline. I love it. I never feel happier than in that space. One of the reasons is it’s probably the same reason that people go and shave their heads and follow gurus and join weird cults is because secretly there are times when all we want are rules. There’s no ground under your feet in life so much of the rest of the time. It’s also ephemeral and you don’t know how you’re supposed to be and what are you supposed to do.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And so I’m also thinking of a friend of mine who had a child who had a lot of Attention Deficit Disorder trouble and was going to a Montessori school, which is just the wrong place for this kid because there was no structure. And these were hippie parents who were like, “We want our kid to just find his own way.”

Celeste Headlee:
Be free.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And meanwhile he’s going out of his mind and driving everyone out of his mind. And someone had the brilliant idea to send him to the most rigid Catholic School in the city, and all of a sudden he thrived because he was like, “Oh, you mean sit at the desk at this time with your feet this way with your pencil sharpened here. Thank you. I was just wondering what we’re supposed to be doing. I need the rules, I need the discipline.” And I’m like that too when it comes to creativity. When I set that discipline for myself. Your alarm will go off at 4:30 in the morning and you will be up at that desk and you will be in bed at eight o’clock and you will … I blossom in that and out of that comes limitless grounds for imagination.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
I think one of the myths about artists is that we do well in open space where you can do whatever you want. No, we do well in disciplined space. That’s where actually the creativity can really … We do well with deadlines often. We do well with a God at your head saying, “You’ve got to get this done by seven o’clock in the morning.” We like that.

Celeste Headlee:
Hopefully metaphorical.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yes, please. Although was it Updike, one of the Johns. McPhee? One of them.

Celeste Headlee:
One of the Johns.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
One of the Johns said, Steinbeck I think it was, said, “What I really want is to just hire someone to stand behind me with a gun at my head saying you have to get this many pages written.” And I think that’s what editors are for.

Celeste Headlee:
Absolutely. So here’s another quote. This is you talking about the newest book and you say, “I feel like this book is my version of a time that’s not dissimilar to how people are feeling in 1940. There’s a tremendous cloud of dread hanging over the entire dumpster fire of the world right now. I don’t know anybody who’s not stressed and anxious and depressed. What I wanted to give at this moment is a book that would go down like a tray of champagne cocktails.” But the book is all about mistakes. And it occurs to me, aren’t mistakes the things that usually make us anxious?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Oh, yeah. I mean I think of this book also as a bran muffin that’s frosted to look like a cupcake. So, it’s about New York City in the 1940s. It’s about showgirls and playboys and dancers and actresses. It’s about sex, it’s about pleasure, it’s about the theater, it’s about musicals, it’s about all this light stuff, and that’s how I trick you to read it. But then underneath that is the bran muffin, which is that it’s about shame and it’s about mistakes and it’s about self-acceptance. And it’s about particularly about women’s sexual shame. And it’s about a young girl who, very much like me, was very sexually adventurous and had to find her own limits by the only way that many of us can find her own limits, which is by hurting people and realizing that you’ve gone too far and that you can’t do anything about this terrible grievous harm that you’ve caused.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
And then what are you going to do now? How are you going to reconcile that with the rest of your life? What do you do with people who won’t forgive you? Because we all have that in our lives. What do you do when there’s somebody that you’ve harmed who doesn’t want to have any contact with you? Where do you then find the grace to move on? How do you get that internally when you don’t get it externally? I think these are all questions that a lot of us have grappled with in our lives. And so underneath the frosting of the showboat kind of era, I hope that it’s still a really entertaining book, but I also hope that women will take away the central message of it, which is that there’s a line in the book where she says at some point in a woman’s life she gets tired of being ashamed all the time and then she can be who she truly is.

Celeste Headlee:
So let me end the interview by asking you the same question you asked me before we came in the room, which is what are you most passionate about right now?

Elizabeth Gilbert:
It was excited.

Celeste Headlee:
Excited about right now.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah, that’s the word because I actually think passion sometimes is a trap in a culture where you’re always told to follow your passion. Lots of times people don’t have it. That question can make people anxious because we’re all supposed to have some grand passion that is also supposed to be changing the world, that’s also supposed to be monetized.

Celeste Headlee:
Sometimes my passion is nachos.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Yeah, exactly. But excited is a lighter word, and also can change by the day. And I would say for me, what I’m most excited about right now in my life is entering into my 50s. I just turned 50 in July.

Celeste Headlee:
Happy birthday.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
Thank you. And I am so excited to be a 50 year old woman. I am so excited to have earned a certain amount of wisdom and experience and humor about my life. I’m so excited to get to answer questions by saying, as a woman in my 50s, I can say. I feel like it just gives me this gravitas that I feel like is very hard earned. And I know I’m alone. I don’t have a partner. I don’t have kids. I’m excited about that. I’m excited about being this new species of woman who gets to be alone, independent, autonomous, a traveler, a writer, a creator, a supporter of other women. And I’m excited about that. I just feel like there’s a lot of power and a lot of joy in that.

Celeste Headlee:
Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you so much.

Elizabeth Gilbert:
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me on.

Celeste Headlee:
I delighted in it.